Fraunhofer Institutes

The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT helps to shape the future with novel, market-oriented products. In the four departments

User-Centered Computing – Environments tailored to human beings (Prof. Reinhard Oppermann),

Cooperation Systems – Efficient and rich collaboration (Prof. Wolfgang Prinz),

Life Science Informatics – More information for your health (Prof. Thomas Berlage),

Risk Management and Decision Support – Assess, minimize and manage risks (Prof. Thomas Rose)

about 100 researchers work in interdisciplinary teams and combine insights from computer science with questions from other fields. With backgrounds in Computer Science, the Social Sciences, Business Administration, Economics, Psychology and Engineering, our researchers have a broad range of competences. We invent and develop applications custom-tailored to support people in their jobs and to enrich their leisure time. Our specific strength is our ability to build complex systems that incorporate our technological innovations and deliver practical benefits to their users, and to abstract frameworks for future products from these prototypes.

We focus on

• Business applications in the private and public sector, in particular micro-analytic simulation to assess the impact of tax legislation, as well as (risk) analysis and efficiency improvement of complex business processes, e.g. with analysis and decision support tools, and custom-tailored support for cooperation in organizations and networks.

• Mixed reality applications, e.g. Augmented Reality games and demonstrators for exhibitions, science parks or trade fairs.

• Life science & bio informatics, such as navigation systems for minimally invasive surgery, molecular diagnostics and optical systems as well as automated image analysis.

• Mobile information and E-Learning systems, focusing on dynamic adaptation to changing context parameters and metadata, describing e.g. traits of the user, interaction schemata or the situation of use.

• Software engineering, with special emphasis on optimizing human-computer interaction for specific contexts and on usability of applications and devices, web compliance and accessibility.

FIT cooperates closely with Prof. Matthias Jarke’s Information Systems group at RWTH Aachen University.